Cherish

With his last game at the Coliseum only a few days away, USC quarterback Matt Leinart said Tuesday that he was prepared for an emotional week leading into the top-ranked Trojans' showdown with 11th-ranked UCLA. "It's finally coming down to an end," said Leinart, the 2004 Heisman Trophy winner who has never lost a game at home in three seasons as a starter.

The cry came from Palomar Observatory at the start of the decade: Turn down your lights! And by now they mostly have. The treasured astronomical finds being made from the world's most famous observatory were being jeopardized by Southern California's urban sprawl and the increasingly bright sea of street lights, illuminated billboards, parking lot lights and even front-yard landscaping lights pointing skyward.

Brad Daluiso did the traditional New Year's Day thing Tuesday, sitting in front of the television holding the remote control clicker in one hand and the sports page in the other. He came home to El Cajon for the holidays, though he wished he had spent part of this week somewhere else. But after Washington's 46-34 victory over Iowa in the Rose Bowl, Daluiso had cause to reflect on what might have been if UCLA had avoided one of three last-second losses during the regular season.

A day after one of the most improbable victories in the history of the Dodgers, Vin Scully felt like so many of those who either saw it live at Dodger Stadium or on TV. He still couldn't believe it. "I'm not sure in what column you rank this game, but it had to be one of the greatest games in relationship to fan enjoyment," said the Dodgers' Hall of Fame broadcaster. "What amazed me as I was leaving about 10 minutes after the end of the game was all the noise and the honking horns from the fans.

Ask Fred Hendly of Sepulveda about his 1937 Ford coupe "chop top" with custom paint and a Chevy 350 engine. "This car is my baby," he will say. "It's my sanity. It's bigger than life. You couldn't print what it means." Words like those are standard fare at "Cruise Night" at Kevin's Burgers in Reseda, where the San Fernando Valley's auto zealots stage a semimonthly communion.

On Wednesday, our Guy Chronicler, Chris Erskine, reacted to a study of when marriages work and when they don't. Today, Sandy Banks checks it out from the distaff side: It took six years, thousands of hours of research and 130 newlywed couples willing to put their personal lives under a microscope to lead psychologists to a conclusion that sounds like something from a Henny Youngman monologue. Marriage works best when a husband listens to his wife . . . and does what she says.

What are the odds that on the same day the Los Angeles Sports Council would elect to release its annual year-end list of the area's Top 10 Sports Moments for 2003, I'd be doing the same thing? Now you would think that living in the same area, there might be some duplication, but what do you know -- the lists appear to be completely different. The Sports Council chose to rank its list of top events for the year in chronological order, and as luck would have it, I did the same.

Ruth Fuller is 94, but she has the vivacity and health of someone much younger. She knows it, and she is proud of it. But like so many other lively, independent people who have lived well past 80, she sees nothing amazing about it. "I don't think about it, except when someone else, usually younger, brings it up," said Fuller, who is a regular at the Laguna Hills Senior Center. "I feel good. My goodness, I'm too busy to think I'm getting old."

Eugenia Reardon, international artist and devoted fan of the California Angels, has gone on for more than three years without her husband, umpiring legend Beans Reardon. She paints, awaits the new baseball season and misses him terribly. "I worshiped Beans," she said on a recent Sunday afternoon at her Ocean Boulevard home in Long Beach. Beans was 86 when he died in 1984. Eugenia spent 30 years with him, and now no day passes that she doesn't think of him.

If you wanted to search for the heart of the West, you should probably start in Montana. Vast, empty and remote, Montana in spirit is still of the frontier, doggedly clinging to the belief that small is good, development is risky and wide, open space is essential to one's mental well-being. It's not just the abundance of Stetsons and rodeos and rifles mounted in the rear window of pickups that speak of the West here.